VIGILANCE AND MEMORY: MOMENTS -- GROUND ZERO; Painful to Hear

Long before Helen Simpkin Whalen steps onto ground zero, the wind swirling around her, she is determined to be there. She wants to make sure that her sister and the other passengers on the planes are remembered.

Barely a year ago, in August, Ms. Whalen passed the test to become a volunteer firefighter in tiny Cottekill, N.Y. Then her older sister, Jane Louise Simpkin, died aboard United Flight 175 when it plunged into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Since then, Ms. Whalen has been amazed by the attention paid to firefighters and the lack of attention paid to people like her sister.

She is the only member of her family to attend the ceremony. She comes with a friend, a volunteer firefighter from Olive, N.Y., and they are wearing their dress uniforms. Ms. Whalen says they spend their first few minutes at ground zero tending to a 6-year-old girl who has fainted, then a man whose blood pressure is acting up and a woman who has passed out. ''We were in the right place at the right time,'' she says.

But all the while, Ms. Whalen is listening to the roll call of death. Two hours into the reading, it is time for the S's. And at 10:56, she hears her sister's name. A violinist plays ''Amazing Grace,'' one of her sister's favorites. Standing there, she considers the event a funeral for her sister, whose body has not been found.

''I was trying to prepare myself because I knew it would be very difficult to hear it,'' she says later. ''It was very difficult, truly distressing, to hear her name.''